The Whitelist

As an email marketing vendor, we’re constantly on the lookout for ways to help you improve your email marketing ROI. Now more than ever, that ROI is impacted by your online marketing strategy. So here’s a workshop to prepare you to excel online.

 The Online Marketing ROI Tour is the first-ever collaborative workshop between MarketingSherpa and sister companies MarketingExperiments and InTouch. This workshop focuses on helping your company get more from your online marketing spend. Topics include social media, conversion optimization and marketing/sales alignment.
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Again and again, social media makes headlines.

And again, we as the email marketing vendor want to remind you of the importance of making sure your email marketing best practices are up to par before investing time, money and staff resources into a social media campaign.

To emphasize this, I share with you a recent blog from AdvertisingAge. Taddy Hall blogged on “10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media,” and guess what rule #7 is about? Email marketing. To quote Taddy exactly:
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Social media and email are becoming ever more integrated, even as you read this. That doesn’t mean you should only focus on social media best practices. It means you must try harder at your email marketing best practices to survive the shift.

Take Google Buzz, for example. Talk about clutter. Where Gmail was email, now it’s everything. Status updates, photos, videos…all the “buzz” people want to share about themselves and comment on and recommend. Oh, and email. Almost forgot that. And so will the users. They’ll have so much minutia staring from their screens, that your email has even less chance of being noticed than before.
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I can’t seem to get enough of this video on social media statistics. I have watched it three times. If ever a marketer was doubtful about social media, this video will change their minds. If it doesn’t, you might want to get out of marketing while the gettin’s good.

I saw this video at a recent marketing conference, one with three sessions on social media and exactly zero on email marketing. That’s telling. Yet email marketing is still a critical part of this shift.
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At ClickMail these days, it seems not a day goes by without mention of Twitter. Kind of odd for a company focused on email marketing!

As we’ve cautioned before in this email marketing blog, we as an email marketing vendor would prefer to see you focus on getting your email marketing program nearly perfect before investing time and money (i.e. payroll) in Twitter. Nonetheless, companies will Twitter rather than fall behind the social media curve.
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Social media is all the rage. But email is the enabler. In the world of email marketing, email service providers (ESPs) are integrating social media into their platforms, from ExactTarget’s Social Forward to Silverpop’s Engage and Lyris’ HQ.

ESPs aren’t moving away from email. But they are responding to market demands, as our CEO Marco Marini points out in his article just published in DMNews.
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Thank goodness for Chad White. Among a plethora of email marketing blogs, newsletters, whitepapers and more, he almost always has a fresh take on all things email-marketing related.

A recent article from June 2nd bridges the social/email gap quite nicely. Rather than the typical “rah rah, get on the social media bandwagon” message that’s so prevalent today, Chad takes a rational look at the two forms of marketing, and how they can learn from each other. That’s what we need: an understanding of how to integrate social media and email marketing, for better email marketing results, but also for better marketing in general, i.e. more customers, more brand loyalty, more sales, etc.
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